Summary

The bulk of arguments that focus on clean semantics and notational simplicity tend to favor uniting the function and value namespaces. In spite of this, there are those who hold strongly to a belief that a two-namespace system affords useful expressive power that they are unwilling to do without. In the end, practical considerations favor the status quo for Common Lisp. There are a large number of improvements beyond a single namespace that could be made to Common Lisp that would clean it up and simplify it. We feel that the time for such radical changes to Common Lisp has passed, and it is the job of future Lisp designers to take the lessons from Common Lisp and Scheme to produce an improved Lisp.

This paper is an adaptation of a report produced for X3J13 by the authors, a technical working group engaged in standardizing Common Lisp for ANSI.